The Lady and Her Doctor (23 page)

“I suppose so,” she said, “tomorrow's Friday. There's your clinic.”

Nothing could have been further from his mind than the clinic. “We may be too busy, tomorrow. I can skip the clinic for once.” She looked into his face inquiringly. “I figured we'd go to the real estate office tomorrow.”

“They will come to us, Milton.”

He had figured, get the deal over with in the morning. Get to the banks before they closed. He saw himself with a check, stepping up to the cashier, not actually being asked whether he wanted it in thousand-dollar bills, but almost. He had figured Sloane would peel off what was coming to her sister and give it to him to take. He had figured he would get into his car and stop off at Saks Fifth Avenue and buy himself enough clothes for the boat—all he needed to leave the house with was his passport—go down to the steamship line and take any boat they offered. Get on the boat. Get going. “Can't they close the deal immediately?”

“Milton, dear! We aren't dealing with a four-room bungalow, you know!”

You didn't get $110,000 for a four-room bungalow. “That's right.”

“If you go to the clinic, you can take Austen.”

“Why bother? She doesn't need to go all the way to the clinic now she's working for us. I can examine her at home.”

“No, Milton.”

She was starting on the “nos” again, but he should worry. “Why not? You mean she's shy all of a sudden?”

“No.” She put her hand on his knee. “Never mind, you never will understand Austen; don't try.”

“What the hell,” he said, “it's no skin off my nose.” If it was the acme of vulgarity to try to save the old woman a trip to the hospital and a wait on the benches, she could go with him. It won't be long now, he thought, yawning. “If you say so, Sloane, I'll take her in the car tomorrow.”

“Every third Friday,” Sloane said. Then she yawned, too. “Sweet Milton!”

Chapter VII

For once Milton had wanted Sloane to stay beside him in the big bed after they woke, because it was Thursday again and it made him feel good to lie there next to her warm body, pulsing and alive on this Thursday after last Thursday, but for once, because it was Thursday, Sloane wouldn't stay in bed. If Mrs. Austen was to leave when she fixed their dinner tonight, there would be a lot to do, Sloane said, and if he, Milton, wanted to be a dear, he wouldn't lie in bed much longer, either, but would come down to breakfast so that Mrs. Austen could get started on the bedroom. “We're not working her too hard, are we?” he asked, because he even felt grateful to the old woman on this Thursday after the last.

“She just dusts this room and makes the bed. No, we're not working her too hard.”

Sloane tied the belt of her robe in that way she had he hated, as if she were a package and not a woman at all. (Cissie's little fluttery hands, touching, patting, prettifying.)

Sloane paused at the door. “Don't forget to air the room before coming down, Milton.”

Cissie's fluttery little fingers touching him—He couldn't lie in bed then, and pulled up and out of it and dressed. In the Stork—if they were seated on those kind of benches along the wall, if he could sit next to Cissie he could hold her little hand while he told her this was their “one night of love.” He could let her fingers curl and tremble against his palm while he told her. She would start to cry but he would ask her to save the tears. “I'll Cry Tomorrow,” like that book. Milton, bending over the big dim mirror to knot his tie, remembered that he hadn't engineered the, say, thirty, forty bucks he would need to hold Cissie's fluttery hand in the Stork Club, and, flipping the tie too hard, hit himself in the eye with the end. He was rubbing the flicked eye when, with the other, he caught sight of the pin, brooch, what-you-may-call-it, which had slipped down between the mirror and the top of the dresser. He picked it up and examined it. The brooch didn't look like much, like nothing next to some of the junk jewelry Jenny had, but anything Sloane had was the real thing, the coiled-up snake was real gold, those two eyes weren't rhinestone and the red fangs were real rubies.

He went to the window, turning the pin over in his hands. In the first place, Sloane wore the thing so rarely that she probably wouldn't miss it for weeks; in the second place, if she did miss it, she certainly wouldn't suspect him. In the third place, how else would he get to the Stork Club? He flung the window open to winter then, and not because Sloane had asked him to, but because it had become airless in the big room. His face was burning and he stuck it out of the window because he had been trained right; it wasn't easy to steal a piece of jewelry and pawn it. You could say it wasn't stealing—“What's mine is thine,” you could say—but it was stealing and Mom wouldn't like it. (Would Mom like murder? Blackmail? Hell with that!)

Downstairs Sloane was frowning over her mail. Some papers had come from the real estate firm and she said they had omitted something. They had promised to make the wreckers wait for the museum in Boston to send their man down to see whether they would accept the gift of the drawing room, the library and the dining room. (The museum sure looked this gift horse in the mouth, and Milton certainly didn't blame them!) Sloane wanted to go and see that the phrase was inserted before she signed. Milton said he wouldn't go with her and Sloane laughed and said perhaps better not since it was quite obvious what he thought of preserving anything about the place. Milton said what he wanted to preserve was their necks—if she didn't hurry up and get the money to her sister, that might not be so easy. Sloane said no time would be wasted, the provision had merely been overlooked, she would sign the contract this morning.

That gave Milton time to go to the pawn shop. He could have gotten more than the forty bucks he asked, but that was all he needed and he preferred leaving it forty bucks so in case he had to redeem it, he could.

Milton's first thought when he saw Sloane's face was that the real estate firm had backed out because of the clause she had been so stubborn about, but, no, it was nothing like that; it was the pin, the snake brooch. Her great-grandmother's snake brooch. It was missing.

It would turn up, Milton said. “Tell me about the deal.”

She could only talk about the brooch. In the middle of a sentence she stopped and ran to the window to see if, in shaking out the sheets, the pin had been dropped. She went outside to search the grounds under the bedroom window, not stopping to put on a coat. She ran upstairs again and ran her hand across the window sill, getting her palm and fingers filthy and then staring at them as if she couldn't imagine why. No, it was not that valuable, Sloane said. Her eyes were big with misery. It was that she couldn't
bear
to have anything missing. Yes, she did feel precisely as if the world were coming down around her; that was it precisely. To have anything—as he blandly put it—just disappear pulled the props from under her! It might be a big house to him, but not to her. She knew every inch of it. The pin was not “somewhere”; she had been over every inch of the house where the pin might conceivably have gotten, been dropped, pushed, shoved, mislaid, and it wasn't in any of them. Yes, she had been over the whole house “with a fine-tooth comb” as his mother always said!

“On the third floor?” Milton asked.

Sloane gasped.

“Well, now listen. If you're so certain the pin wasn't misplaced—Mrs. Austen does clean the bedroom. Did you ask her about the pin being missing?”

Of course she had asked Mrs. Austen; both she and Mrs. Austen had been over the house looking!

“Ask her to look up on the third floor. Go in and tell her that I'm going through my bureau drawers—in among the shirts and socks, handkerchiefs. And I'll go through the laundry hamper, too. So if I can look, she can look, can't she? Or is she better than I am?”

“
How
is it different?” he asked. “If I can look why can't she? Why just because she is a servant? All right, then,” Milton said, “you and she are so chummy but you can't ask her a simple thing like that! If you can't ask her, I can!” He left Sloane in the little room.

Mrs. Austen was sitting in the kitchen on the old rocking chair which she had pulled into the sunlight near the window. She was sitting with her knees apart and a yellow bowl between her knees, shelling peas into the bowl. When she saw him, she pushed herself out of the chair and stood up with the bowl held to her and her striped apron with the pea pods in it wrapped around it. He was very friendly about the whole thing, telling her first about him going up to look-see if the pin was among his stuff—the madam had asked him and the madam was also asking her. While he talked to Mrs. Austen, the color changed in her face, the skin turning to a yellow as mustard-color as the thick bowl in her arms.

Austen talked through stiff bluish lips. “Does madam wish me to go through my things?”

“That's the idea.” He made nothing out of it.

“Madam wishes—” She put down the bowl of peas, still clutching the apron full of pods, then pulled it off clumsily and laid it carefully on the table next to the bowl. Then she walked right past Milton toward the hall.

Milton went back to the little room. “My God,” he said, “you should have seen her, Sloane! You would think you were accusing her of putting poison in the
pain perdu!
”

Sloane's face was white. “Milton, you said it was my idea that she should go through her things?”

“Sure. Why not? Come on, now, tell me about the deal.” She said nothing. “It's going through?” She nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the door. All her attention was on the old woman toiling upstairs, as if she were going to the electric chair. To get her mind off Mrs. Austen, Milton asked Sloane to help him go through his things, unless, that is, she had already done so, and she gaped at him and said, “I beg your pardon? Of
course
not!” Milton said, “Why of course not?” They were married, weren't they? Sloane's lip curled. She wouldn't deign to answer that!

When he got her upstairs she simply stood by while he emptied the shirts and stuff out of his drawers, listening, he could see, to the old woman walking back and forth in her room on the third floor. “Nope,” Milton said, shoving the last drawer back in. “Not in my stuff.”

The old woman was no longer moving around, either. She, too, had finished looking.

Sloane sighed and sat on the edge of the bed. “Milton, we must call the police.”

“And I thought what worried you was the old lady's feelings!”

“Precisely. We must call the police immediately, before Austen goes out, so that it will be impossible for her to have moved the pin out of the place.”

“And I thought getting Austen here was the answer to your prayers! A real servant, a real antique Last of the Mohicans!” The police, he thought, my God, the cops in on it! It wouldn't take the cops long to go through the pawn shops and locate the pin and when Sloane found he had stolen it, all hell would break loose. Oh, God, he thought, I'm just too damn dumb to live! Jenny was right, he thought, too damn dumb! I didn't even have to take the pin. Why did I have to tell Cissie we'd meet at the Stork Club? The corner drugstore would have been Stork Club enough for Cissie, what did she care about Stork Clubs where he was concerned, but no, he had to show off, he had to steal the pin! A poem Maureen had learned and made all of them learn came back to him—Dum de dumm dumm—“for the sake of a horseshoe the battle was lost.” Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. For the sake of showing off, he had lost everything! Sloane was staring at him from the bed there. “For the sake of a lousy pin you'll lose Austen, the Last of the Mohicans!”

She shoved her hair back. “But it isn't for the pin!”

“Oh, no! Oh, no! The principle of the thing! The sentimental value, I suppose! I heard that one before!”

“I'm afraid we'll lose Austen if we don't do it. How can I make you understand—” She shook her head at him. “You and Austen are worlds apart, how can I make you understand? I am calling the police because that is what Austen will want under the circumstances! Since you told her I suspected her, Milton, it is the only thing to do!”

“She
wants
you to call in the cops? Now I heard everything!”

“It is the only way to end this honorably.”

He said, “It will end it! It will end it!” And then it came to him, dope that he was! It took all that blood, sweat and tears for him to see the way out. “For Austen's sake? Maybe. As you said, we're worlds apart. I'll never understand Austen. O.K. Now, how about for our sake? How about that? You must be nuts, get the cops in! Sure, let the cops get started going over this house with a fine-tooth comb! One lousy pin misplaced—sent to the cleaners maybe. We've got to tell her this minute we sent it out to the cleaners, but for the love of Mike don't let the cops set foot inside this house!” He saw Sloane's eyes fill with tears. “No, I don't know exactly what they might find, but I do know we'd be nuts to give them an engraved invitation to come in here without a warrant. For example, how do we know that your sister didn't go to the cops? How do we know the only reason they haven't been here already is because they couldn't get a warrant on what they have, but, go on, give them an engraved invitation! Invite them here for tea!”

“Milton!”

“Tea and crumpets for the duchess and the cops!”

“Poor old Austen,” Sloane whispered. “Poor old girl. Poor old thing!”

“Just tell her the pin probably went out to the cleaners.”

“You tell her,” Sloane whispered. “Poor old thing!” She lay down on the bed, face down, and pressed her hands over her ears.

Obediently Milton went upstairs. The door to the room was open and he went inside. He hadn't been up here since Austen came and as he entered he decided it smelled of clean old woman. She was sitting on a straight chair with her hands in her lap and even though he signaled her not to, when he came in, she stood up beside the chair, as if lined up for inspection. A moth-eaten old suitcase lay open on her bed. It was such a pathetic old wreck of a suitcase that Milton couldn't look at it and turned to the stand-up pictures in old-fashioned frames she had set out on her dresser. Probably all dead and gone. His voice was very gentle when he told the old woman that the madam was pretty sure now she must have sent the pin out with stuff for the cleaners.